WMU's bowl hopes come down to four games this Saturday, and all four need to fall its way

John A. Lacko | Special to the Kalamazoo GazetteWMU football players, from left, Dann O'Neill, Johnnie Simon and E.J. Riley, shown celebrating the Broncos' win over Eastern Michigan on Nov. 13, hope to have another reason to smile when the bowl picture takes greater shape in the coming week.

KALAMAZOO — As coach Bill Cubit prepared to board a plane Sunday afternoon to hit the recruiting trail, his hopes for another game this season, however faint, remained.

Western Michigan University’s 41-7 win Friday at Bowling Green gave the Broncos their sixth win, making them eligible for a bowl game.

But a 6-6 program out of the Mid-American Conference isn’t going to have bowl executives tripping over themselves to extend an invitation. The Broncos’ entertaining passing game and three straight blowout wins aren’t likely to dent preconceptions, perhaps fair, about the league’s competitiveness and fan travel in the postseason.

For WMU to be assured its season would continue, it needed a bevy of five-win teams in more prominent leagues to fall last weekend.

The Broncos received some help — losses by Texas, Cal, Colorado, Houston and Idaho keep the Broncos mathematically alive.

Wins by Georgia, Tennessee and Louisville, though, make the equation difficult.

There are 70 spots to be had in 35 bowl games. Heading into next weekend, there are 70 bowl-eligible Division I-A teams, WMU included.

Four five-win teams play this coming Saturday. All four probably have to lose for WMU to play in a bowl game.

The Sun Belt Conference’s secondary bowl agreement with the Little Caesars Bowl (formerly the Motor City Bowl), which the Big Ten won’t be able to fill, means a third team from the Sun Belt — Middle Tennessee State, in this case — would have to be chosen ahead of WMU.

The good news for the Broncos is they’ll be rooting for favorites in three of those games. But they’ll also need Washington State to upset rival Washington. A month ago, this would have seemed impossible. But the Cougars are coming off a 31-14 win at Oregon State, which followed a seven-point loss to Cal and, two weeks earlier, a respectable 38-28 loss at No. 12 Stanford.

“That’s a tough place to play,” a hopeful-sounding Cubit said of Washington State, where he coached a game in 2004 as the offensive coordinator at Stanford.